Are we trying to kill the McCanns?

Are we really so desperate for Madeleine's story to have a dramatic conclusion that we want to push her parents over the edge?

Are we trying to kill the McCanns? Well, that's what it feels like as, day after day, the barrage of critical stories keeps coming.

Kate McCann finally broke down on Spanish TV and showed all the emotion she has been accused of lacking.

The doctor whose professional manner and pretty face have attracted so many bitchy comments was barely able to control herself.

Practically howling like a wounded animal, she said that, as Madeleine's Mummy, she believed her little girl was still alive.

Were her critics satisfied? No, poor Kate had apparently cried the wrong kind of tears. Tears of guilt, not sorrow.

Now that she was showing her true feelings, all those armchair detectives concluded that Maddie's mum must be faking it.

Seventy per cent of viewers said that they did not believe the McCanns.

They were bothered by Gerry and Kate's body language - the couple appeared unable to comfort each other.

Suspicious, eh?

Furthermore, Gerry was overheard coldly telling his wife to make sure her microphone was turned off before she spoke to him.

My, how a million amateur Sherlock Holmeses loved that clue!

Please note that Gerry is always described as doing things coldly.

Not numbly.

Not in the shell-shocked manner of a man who has failed in his most sacred duty as a father, which was to protect his first-born daughter from harm.

A proud man who has pulled himself up into a good profession from a poor Glasgow background and who must be humbled daily by the knowledge that all his achievements are as dust weighed against this one monumental, agonising failure.

And now the McCanns are under attack again, this time for making two mortgage payments out of the Madeleine Fund.

Yet when Gerry says that he is going back to work this week as a heart specialist, he is accused of being too distraught and potentially putting his patients at risk.

So what are the family supposed to do for money? Or must they sell the house and live rough with the twins on the street to appease the snarling gods of public opinion?

Why can't we just accept that shock does strange, deforming things to people? Unexploded grief can blow entire families apart when they appear to be in the same room.

In his new autobiography, former England rugby captain Lawrence Dallaglio movingly recalls the devastating effect on his own family when his 19-year-old sister, Francesca, perished in the Marchioness riverboat disaster in 1989.

"Dad was in one place, trying to be very stoic and behaving as he thought the head of the family should behave. Mum was overcome with grief and clearly traumatised," writes Lawrence.

Eileen Dallaglio later admitted she had gone into a type of shock from which she did not recover for 15 years.

Like Kate McCann, she threw herself into campaigning to make things safer for other people's children.

Lawrence's dad eventually had a heart attack, believed to have been triggered by all the suppressed emotion.

Is that the ending we foresee for Gerry McCann?

The cardiac specialist who dies of a broken heart? Or would the couple's tormentors settle for mental breakdown and divorce as the latest twist in the nation's favourite soap opera?

Or here's a thought: how about leaving the McCanns in peace to salvage what remains of their lives, and to begin the slow and painful process of grieving properly for the daughter they have lost?

It may not make for front-page drama, but it's the development they surely deserve.

Meanwhile, six months on, Portuguese detectives have made a stunning breakthrough in the case.

They think it's possible that Madeleine was abducted.

Well, it's a start.

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Nicole's x-factor

First Uma Thurman attended a fashion event wearing a piece of black toilet paper cunningly disguised as an evening gown.

Strangely, the 37-year-old actress had forgotten to wear a bra under the transparent material so the whole world could see her Kill Bills.

Now Nicole Kidman, the most reliably elegant star in Hollywood, shows up at a music awards ceremony in an itsy-bitsy dress that even Britney Spears would have rejected as too trashy.

To say the 40-year-old star struck a bum note doesn't quite cover it. And the frock most certainly didn't.

Flashing your bottom in public is really only acceptable if you're two years old and potty-training.

Maths has never been my strong point, but I think we may be able to work out the formula that is driving these goddesses to make a spectacle of themselves.

If X is the number of years you have left in your movie career and Y is the number of times you have assured interviewers that your marriage is perfectly healthy, then X divided by Y equals the thickness in millimetres of the material you choose to drape over any parts of your body that stick out.

Let's call it the First Law of Diminishing Box Office Returns.

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Four's a crowd

Ulrikka Jonsson tells Hello! that she is pregnant by her latest boyfriend, Brian Monet.

In general, it's only people who own pitbulls who reckon that four kids by four different dads is a good idea, but the TV presenter is defiant.

"The fact that relationships with their fathers didn't work out is not solely my responsibility," she says sweetly.

Is this the same Ulrika who made a programme called Am I A Sex Addict?

To which the answer was a resounding Yes!

Is this the same Ulrika who wrote that she was outraged by Iain Duncan Smith's report suggesting that a stable marriage is the best recipe for children's happiness?

"Many young people have seen their parents go through the misery of [being] forced to stay in unhappy unions," she fumed.

Indeed, but not in the Jonsson household, where unions of any kind last as long as, oooh, a tube of Pringles.

To borrow from Oscar Wilde, to have two different children by different fathers may be regarded as complicated.

To have three by different dads seems like carelessness.

But four? Four suggests a dedication to your own selfish desires at the expense of the small people in your care.

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How shameful that a child must beg for medecine

When Gordon Brown gets misty-eyed about Britishness, he always mentions a sense of fair play. I wonder if our Prime Minister could explain to Chantelle Hill what he means by fair play and Britishness.

Six-year-old Chantelle has raised more than £4,000 to buy a drug that will help keep her dad, David, alive. Mr Hill, a 45-year-old builder, has lung cancer.

Doctors told him he was too weak to have more chemotherapy, but he was not allowed the drug Tarceva, which would both prolong and improve his life.

The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence decided the drug was "not an effective use of NHS resources".

Six-year-old Scottish girls do not have to go round their town, as the enterprising Chantelle did, putting up posters begging: "Please help me to save my daddy."

When Chantelle Hill is older, she may well ask what kind of British fair play it is that gave terminally-ill fathers in one part of the UK a decent quality and quantity of life, while her daddy made do with borrowed time.

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What does the BBC think it is playing at, slashing a third off the budget of its fantastic Natural History Unit? Fifty-seven out of 180 staff will lose their jobs.

Based in Bristol, the unit, which has brought us series such as Planet Earth and Life In The Freezer, is quite simply the best at what it does in the world. And it generates huge revenue for the Corporation.

As I saw for myself when I accompanied a team to Venezuela, NHU staff are knowledgeable, brave, skilful, insanely patient, intrepid and modest.

Best of all, they cost the licence-payer about a quarter of Jonathan Ross's tie allowance. I will never forget the heartstopping sight of Justine, a young camerawoman, stepping across the void 200 feet above the rainforest floor, onto a narrow platform, just so she could get the perfect shot of Sir David Attenborough.

Justine told me she had been inspired as a child by BBC wildlife programmes and she wanted to continue the tradition. If they cut it down now, what hope for the Justines of tomorrow? Like a beautiful woodland, the eco-system of the Natural History Unit has taken decades to evolve. Once destroyed, it can never be replaced.

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So who is the royal at the centre of the sex, drugs and blackmail story? Surely his or her identity is not the point. It's that apart from our wonderful Queen, most other royals have behaved so disreputably over the past decade, we wouldn't be surprised to learn it was any one of them. There are more possible suspects here than on board Agatha Christie's Orient Express. Over to you, Poirot.